In Conversation

For years, the only time Constance Shulman was recognized was when she opened her mouth. Though she had starred in the original stage production of Steel Magnolias and was the face of Kraft mayonnaise for several years, her most iconic role by far was as the voice of the orange-skinned dream girl Patti Mayonnaise on the Nickelodeon animated series Doug.

At least, until Orange is the New Black came along. After Doug went off the air in 1999, Shulman took nearly 15 years off to raise her children, and had only started to think about returning to acting when the role of Yoga Jones came along. Suddenly, as part of the wildly popular Orange ensemble, Shulman is getting recognized on the street and Googled by fellow subway passengers who want to confirm they’ve spotted her. “I’ll be walking down the street and hear, ‘Yoga!’ It’s really sweet.”

Still, Shulman’s voice remains her signature, a scratch and Southern-accented marvel that she didn’t alter at all to play middle-schooler Patti on Doug. As Shulman tells it, Doug creator Jim Jinkins saw one of her Kraft commercials and told his wife that was the voice he wanted for Patti. (Yes, as she tells it, it’s pure coincidence that she did both mayonnaise commercials and a character named Patti Mayonnaise.) As it turns out, Jinkins’s wife was also Shulman’s aerobics instructor, so she traveled to the Jinkins apartment to record an audition for what she thought would be a tiny project forever based out of the apartment.

Instead, Doug became a staple of Millennial childhoods, in its original run on Nickelodeon and through a transition to ABC. And though most of the people who recognize Shulman’s voice are the grown-up kids who watched Doug in the 90s, it’s not just 30-year-olds who’ve become attached. “It played on Nick at Nite not that long ago. It got a new audience too.” Some of that new audience includes Shulman’s own children, whom she sometimes carried in a Snugli to the recording studio and who are now pursuing acting careers of their own.

Her work and family haven’t stopped overlapping, either—Shulman’s husband, Reed Birney, plays the do-gooder Representative Donald Blythe on Netflix’s other powerhouse series, House of Cards. They may be the only married couple to be integral parts of two separate Netflix series, but somehow, that doesn’t mean a free Netflix subscription for the family. At least the adoration of an entire generation makes a pretty good consolation prize.